Locking up the dogs of war: huge decline in war-related deaths

In wars between states last century, whole populations and their industrial might were mobilised to equip and train professional armies that inflicted huge casualties on their opponents' armies and civilian populations.

Britain's famous World War II leader, Winston Churchill, decried the destructive power wielded by modern states to wage war.

In a speech to the House of Commons in May 1901, he prophesised that "when mighty populations are impelled on each other, each individual severally embittered and inflamed - when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury - a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors."

He warned: "The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings."

Fortuitously, over the past quarter century, as the "wars of peoples" dramatically declined, war-related deaths have been largely confined to internal conflicts within nations.

The Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute has profiled countries most at risk of war. In particular they include countries:

• with large youth populations, particularly with low-income levels and low rates of economic growth;
• that lack strong political institutions capable of governing a country;
• that have a high proportion of their GDP from oil and other natural resources, where extremes of wealth and poverty exacerbate internal state tensions.

Conversely, there are several major factors that contribute to the decline of major conflicts.

The biggest factors winding back global conflicts were:

• the end of Soviet communism, which had fostered proxy wars in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia;
• the growth in the number of democracies, which provide peaceful means of resolving issues that once could have led to armed conflict;
• the expansion of the global economy; and
• United Nations and regional peace-keeping operations, which, despite monumental failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, have halted or dampened down conflicts in a number of high-conflict areas.

Cutting off contraband financing and other forms of assistance from neighbouring states has also curbed the resources that fuel many conflicts.

The decline in the number and intensity of major conflicts also brings into serious question the "clash of civilisations" thesis promoted by the late American political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, when he attempted to predict the likely course of a post-Cold War new world order.